As you probably already know (from the large heading), my name is Shane Sanders. I am an associate professor of sport analytics at Syracuse University. My main interests lie in researching and writing about sports economics and other areas of microeconomics. Below, you will find a summary of my education and work. My sports economics work has been cited in a Supreme Court document (#08-661), on the Marginal Revolution blog, foxsports.com, msnbc.com, finance.yahoo.com, and euroinvestor.co.uk. Work in other areas has been cited by the Temple University Center on Innovations in Learning, as well as in popular books (Why Popcorn Costs so Much at the Movies: And Other Pricing Puzzles by Richard McKenzie and Principles of Conflict Economics by Anderton and Carter) and a popular business education magazine (BizEd Magazine, November/December 2009 issue).

Many employers want employees to waste less printing paper. Such an employer might consider publicly presenting an end-of-the-year certificate to the employees who have printed the most pages (e.g., as gold, silver, and bronze medal certificates). People are found to respond strongly to indications that they are less environmentally friendly or more wasteful relative to their peer group. Further, this nudge would play upon individual uncertainty. Even if I am, in fact, a low frequency user, the mere thought that I could be a high-frequency user might cause me to reduce my printing volume.

Filtering the Chaos in Sports Bars:

Sports bars often show multiple games at once. As a result, they are unable to provide sound for any game (It would be a jumble of noises if they did). This is a natural environment for closed captioning. Yet, closed captioning is almost never provided, and managers seldom know how to turn it on. The solution to this problem would be a television that automatically renders closed captioning when the volume is set to zero. If a viewer is not receiving volume, it stands to reason that he or she would typically benefit from closed captioning as the default option.

Financial (in)solvency among retired professional athletes:

A high proportion of retired professional athletes file personal bankruptcy. The response by some leagues is to teach basic personal finance to rookie players. However, I believe that this problem has a lot to do with social pressure exerted on athletes to "spread the wealth." There are jokes to the effect that an athletes number of cousins rises dramatically after he or she "goes pro." To combat this phenomenon of social financial pressure, leagues could allow teams to segment salaries between current pay for a given player and pay into, e.g., an annuity account for that player. The player could decide the split. However, each dollar paid into annuity would only count against the team's (capped or luxury taxable) payroll, e.g., by half.

Each player would be free to choose his or her split between current pay and annuity pay as a component of his or her contract. However, a player who agrees to a higher annuity percentage would often be offered a higher salary by teams, ceteris paribus, as he or she could alleviate a team's luxury tax bill (salary cap problem).